Bad Education

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Lush, deceptive, elaborately calculated and heartfelt, Pedro
Almodovar's Bad Education is a mystery and a pleasure, a
combination made clear from its earliest moments, with its stylish
credits, visual and aural echoes of Hitchcock, film noir references
and lavish excess. But its style is unequivocally its
substance.

The film begins in 1980. A successful film director, Enrique
(Fele Martinez) is searching for a new subject for his next movie.
One presents itself, out of the blue: a young man, Ignacio, comes
to see him, bearing a short story, called The Visit, and
bringing a memory and an enigma from the past.

Ignacio (Gael Garcia Bernal, in a performance of multiple
identities that is at different times as lush, deceptive,
elaborately calculated and heartfelt as the movie itself), was a
student with Enrique at a Catholic boys school of the Franco era,
and his narrative is based on incidents from their shared
experience. Ignacio is now an actor: he calls himself Angel, and
insists there is a lead role - that of a transexual who assumes
another identity - for him in The Visit.

The Visit is the tale of an intimate friendship between
two boys, and a priest who sexually abused one of them: it's about
drag queens, blackmail and revenge, a drama in which Enrique is
deeply implicated. It's a story that he is immediately drawn to,
and it starts to unfold, a second strand of storytelling with Angel
in his dream role.

Whose version it is, what relation it bears to the past, whether
it is the film that Angel or Enrique imagines is not clear: and it
becomes more confusing as Enrique's movie within a movie begins to
be made.

As deception follows deception, memory and fantasy feed off each
other, identities become obscured, and "real" characters turn up to
confound our understanding of what has gone before.

But it's that lack of clarity that gives Bad Education
its power. Nothing is what it seems because Almodovar seems to be
suggesting that fictions and reinventions are ways of being in the
world and understanding its possibilities.

And fiction's ability to mislead viewers can also be its way of
challenging them, of confronting them with the difficulty of making
moral judgements. But Almodovar also knows - and knows how to
deliver - the pleasures of storytelling as well as the paradoxical
truths of beautiful lies.